Atheism is Egotism

At the end of the piece on Creation and Evolution I asked the question "Why do human beings want to reject spiritual truth?", and I will seek to answer that question here. But first I have to say that it is a valid question as it is clear that many atheists are so not because of an act of intellect but one of will. The fact of God, a higher power of intelligence and love who is the source of our being, is graven on every human heart, even if many of us would deny this. To be sure, the present materialistic culture and artificial environment in which we live play a strong part in blinding us to the reality of the Creator, but there is more to it than this. A number of people nowadays are not just casually agnostic or uninterested in whether there may or may not be a God because they are too busy going about their daily business. They are not just spiritually indifferent but actively and assertively atheistic. They claim there is no evidence for God (a debatable view), maintain that science gives them all the answers about life they need (equally disputable since it actually gives none about life and its origin as such), and even condemn religion as morally reprehensible (confusing wrong-headed response to religious teaching with the teaching itself). They claim to be motivated entirely by reason, and at one time I thought that might be true and that they were wrong but honest. I now see that that is not the case, and that many people actually do not want there to be a God or Creator to whom they owe their existence. They are motivated not so much by reason as intellectual pride and arrogance.

I should say that this accusation is not leveled at everyone who doubts a spiritual reality to life. The world is too much with many people, and the idea of God simply doesn't matter to them unless and until they are brought low by suffering. However there are people who reject God not because of unbelief but because they hate the idea of God and of themselves as a created being. They disguise their true motives, probably even from themselves, which makes it very hard to discuss the matter with them. They are as wedded to their position as a religious fanatic is to his. Sometimes these people will try to be more morally pure than any believer because they need to prove to themselves, and to others, the superiority of their position, and show that they do not need God to be a good or principled person. However on examination it transpires that their morality is based precisely on their sense of superiority and an intellectual arrogance rather than simple goodness, kindness or a genuine concern for others. At best, it is a mentally based morality rather than one of the heart, echoing their own often highly developed intellect but lack of intuitive vision.

A confirmed atheist is always an egotist. Of course a believer may be, but an atheist always is because he has denied God, and the fundamental reason for denying the reality of God is the desire to assert the primacy of the self and to be beholden to no one. It is almost a form of teenage rebellion and dislike of being told what to do which leads me to think that many dogmatic atheists are simply people who have not grown up properly or who carry the wounds of childhood within them, often to the point of not wanting to be healed of these wounds because they feel defined by them; and to be healed would be to lose their sense of self-validating injustice, on the flames of which they feed.

For the plain truth is that atheism is not a reasoned and logical assessment of the situation in which we find ourselves. It is often no more than an angry rejection of God, and denial of the transcendent because of the implications of what that would mean for the atheist's sense of personal autonomy.

Now, of course, some people don't reject God so much as what they believe to be an anthropomorphic version of God, and this is understandable. Obviously the reality of God is far beyond any idea we might have about it. But the fact that we are made in His image (and we are since the nature of his being is manifested in us) means that we can, on some level, reflect His reality. This means that ideas we might have of Him are not completely false as long as they correspond to the highest we can find in ourselves. For instance, on the matter of anthropomorphising absolute reality, God is not a person but He has a personal aspect and this personal aspect is absolutely real. It is not that pure being or the impersonal aspect of God, the Godhead, the Absolute, is above intelligible being or the personal aspect of the One. It is that the two are different aspects of the same thing

Let me repeat this since it matters. God and the Godhead are both eternal. God does not emerge from the Godhead, as some esoteric philosophies believe. He does not come out of it or depend on it or derive from it as a subsidiary expression. He is it and it is Him, no difference. God is the actuality of the Godhead which represents abstract being to His real being. Hence there is no Absolute without God and no God without the Absolute, and the Absolute does not become God. They are the same One Reality. All of which means that God is no more impersonal than He is personal. There is no life in the abstract without its instantiation so those who seek the Absolute without fully acknowledging the Personal God will never find what they are looking for.

The doctrinaire atheist requires everything to be explainable in scientific terms, apparently not noticing that a great deal of our experience lies outside the limitations imposed by the senses which is the world explored (often in extraordinary detail) by science. But what this leads to is a denial of such things as goodness, beauty and truth as being in any way real. They become merely relative things, simple concepts or personal judgments, which evaporate when you look at them too closely. Now, there are no solid, intellectual grounds for doing this so it can only be a prejudice. The prejudice springs from a desire, and the desire is to reject God because the person does not want to think of himself as a creature, a created being accountable for his actions to a judge who has authority over him. He wants to be free but the freedom he wants is of and for the self. However to be bound by and to the self is the greatest captivity. The only true freedom is from the self, and this is only possible in God.

No One Comes to the Father Except Through Me

This is a question that addresses something many people interested in esoteric or mystical forms of spirituality, contemporary or traditional, shy away from. But it's something that we, especially we in the West, must always come back to. Is Jesus Christ a spiritual teacher or is he the spiritual teacher?

Q. How do you interpret the words of Jesus that no one can reach God except through him? Should we take them seriously or do they just have a symbolic meaning?

A. "No one comes to the Father except through me." These are extraordinary words. Can they possibly be true? On the face of it they seem to be saying that Christianity is the only true spiritual path. But do they really mean that or are they pointing to something different? Remember that at the time they were spoken there was no such thing as Christianity. There was Christ but not yet a religion based on his teachings. Let me set forth here what I think Jesus meant by these words.

To begin with, though, there is little point in even considering this matter unless you think that the words might be true, and that Jesus had (and still has) the right to say them. So let me say straightaway that I do think they are true. When we come across them in the Gospel of St John we don't say to ourselves that here is a megalomaniac with severe delusions of grandeur. Such is the power of Jesus's personality, the strength of his aura, that we take them seriously. We believe them. I believe them. They don't make me want to give the person who says them a wide berth, and yet if I heard them from anyone else I would certainly react like that. In the context of the one who speaks them, these words convey a deep sense of truth. It is just as it says in the Bible. Jesus speaks as one having authority.

But even if we accept this saying as true there are still various ways in which we can take it. We can interpret it literally or metaphorically, or we can say that it is true on both these levels. I think this last way is the correct way and that it is true in both a literal and metaphorical sense. No one can reach God who does not go through Christ. However to say that does not mean that everybody must become a Christian. We must distinguish between outer and inner truths or paths, and also between the incarnated Jesus in whose name a religion was founded and the risen Christ who on the heavenly plane is the Master of Masters and the Teacher of Angels and Men. (Not that these are different beings. It is more that they are the human and divine faces of the same being). The risen Christ is the inner channel through which we all must approach God, and though this does not negate or replace the individual connection we all have to God, who is eternally present as the core of our being, it is nonetheless the way through which that individual connection is opened. We all have the divine spark within us but that spark can only be fully ignited through the inner spiritual reality that is Christ, through whom we must pass in order to find God the Father.

Not everyone will be able to accept this as an intellectual proposition and, from the perspective of an outer spiritual practice, they do not necessarily need to. Many who do not follow Christ outwardly may be doing so inwardly in that they follow the essence of the teachings he embodied. In the same way many who follow him outwardly may not be doing so inwardly. Christ does not have an monopoly on all forms of the teachings that lead eventually to the Father, Divine Reality, but he is their personification, their instantiation, and they are given life and salvific power through him.

So the outer sense of these words may not apply literally to everyone but the inner sense does, and so does the metaphorical sense and what it means is this. Those who seek God only as an impersonal force, who restrict Him to a kind of universal cosmic consciousness will not find him. We cannot access the unmanifest divine essence except through the Personal God who is not a lower level of reality than the formless Godhead but fully one with it, never to be separated from it, and the only reliable portal to it. For in truth there is no such thing as the impersonal God. If there were how could the personal be its primary expression? Indeed, how could the idea of the personal exist at all? If the impersonal really were the root of existence there could be no I, and if there were no I then there could be nothing. Certainly nothing could ever be known. So the personal aspect of God cannot be ignored or denied which is to say that the full recognition of God with form is essential if you would go beyond it to the formless. This may be transpersonal but it is not impersonal and it can never be known without complete acceptance of the personal and all that it implies. Why? Because only that allows for a genuine love and humility, and a proper sense of one's place in the divine chain of being. This is the reason that the Masters said 'Remember the Creator'. Today too many people, both materialists and followers of certain spiritual paths, don't do this.

In several articles here I have argued against the idea, basic to advaita Vedanta and Buddhism, that the personal belongs to a lower level of reality than the impersonal and is therefore, in some sense, unreal. I have said that the Personal God is not merely a limited expression of Impersonal Being, and ultimately subsumed into that, but that the two are co-equal and coeval, two faces of the one reality representing God in creative mode and at rest. If I now say that the impersonal does not actually exist at all, i.e. does not correspond to anything in reality, what I mean is that ultimate reality cannot just be pure unqualified, featureless being or the personal could never arise from it. God cannot just be life. He must be alive.  Deeper levels of reality must include, in some form (not necessarily expressed but present), what derives from them, and so, if the highest reality is above the personal, that can only mean that it includes the personal in the same way as a cube includes a square not that the square reduces to nothingness at the cube level. If that is what is meant by impersonal I have no argument with the term, but very often that is not what is meant. The square is reduced to a line if not a point if not a blank if not, as the Buddhists say, emptiness. Ultimate reality may be beyond the personal but it is impersonal only to the extent that God is not limited by or to form. But then He is not limited by or to formlessness either. If, in His essence, He is beyond Personhood, or our conception of it, neither does He fall below it into a kind of blank facelessness. He is not mere abstraction but real in the most concrete of ways. So for us, made in His image which means reflecting His reality, God must be personal before He is transpersonal. And this is the metaphorical meaning behind the words spoken by Jesus. We must go beyond the personal to find the Father but we can only do that by going through, going through but fully including, the personal. Formlessness is not less than form.

I don't by any means claim to have covered all that is captured in this saying here, but I hope I have said enough to give you some food for further thought.

Cycles of Change

In his book "The Order of the Ages", which I thoroughly recommend to anyone interested in the subject of this post, the author Robert Bolton gives the dates of the Kali Yuga as being from 3102 BC to 2082 AD. If you want to know how he arrives at those dates you must read the book but, suffice it to say here, his reasons for them seem plausible enough. For those not familiar with the term Kali Yuga, it refers to the last of four ages in Hinduism during which the world gradually descends from a natural spiritual state into materialism and disconnection from the divine order. This particular form of the doctrine is an Indian one but the idea of a spiritual fall as time goes by exists in many traditions, and we are all familiar with the sense of nostalgia for a Golden Age in the distant past. This is the polar opposite to the modern belief in progress but does not necessarily conflict with it if we understand the traditional concept to relate to matters of spiritual consciousness and awareness of the source while progress in the modern sense refers exclusively to the material world which includes the social, technological and political spheres. Of course, viewed from the spiritual standpoint, progress in these spheres is no progress at all if it derives from an ignorance of our true nature and results in a divorce between our material and spiritual selves. In fact, in this sense, it is the very opposite of real progress.

The beginning date of the Kali Yuga is interesting because it appears to coincide with the start of recorded history. Thus all that we regard as our known past falls within the period of spiritual ignorance, the lowest point in the cycle that runs from a pristine new beginning when men walk with the gods to the time when the gods withdraw, spirit is gradually obscured and our external physical environment becomes the principal focus of attention. Now this may be a fall in one sense, it undoubtedly is a fall, but it is also a natural and inevitable occurrence that presumably has the purpose or effect of helping us develop aspects of our nature (primarily mental) that otherwise might remain in abeyance. How far it is taken, though, probably depends on us and our reaction to the cosmic winds of change. We can go completely with the flow of spiritual deterioration or we can recognise it for what it is and, to an extent at least, remain apart from it, remaining centred, insofar as possible, in higher truth. The old saying that the stars incline but do not compel is relevant here.

The constituent parts of a full cycle are often referred to as Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron (though this last, corresponding to the Kali Yuga, has nothing to do with the archaeological Iron Age when that metal was first used), and, temporally, they stand to each other in the ratio 4, 3, 2 and 1. Thus the Krita Yuga or Golden Age is four times longer than the Kali Yuga which we can see from the dates above lasts for approximately five thousand years. So the most recent Golden Age lasted for around twenty thousand years. Now, interestingly, because of the Law of Correspondences, each cycle can be broken down into mini-cycles which exist in the same proportion and bear the same relation to each other as do the parts of the main cycle. So within the Kali Yuga there are four sub-periods corresponding to Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron which last for 4/10, 3/10, 2/10 and 1/10 respectively of the total duration. Remember the Kali Yuga in this system runs from 3102 BC to 2082 AD so these sub-periods range from 2,076 years to 518 years, the period in which we find ourselves now, the tail end of the Kali Yuga. For ease of comprehension I'll put this in a table below in a form copied from Robert Bolton.

• Gold of Iron   3102 BC - 1026 BC    2,076 years
• Silver of Iron  1026 BC -  528 AD    1,554 years
• Bronze of Iron 528 AD -  1564 AD   1,036 years
• Iron of Iron    1564 AD - 2082 AD      518 years.

Those who wish can look for patterns in these periods. They are not hard to find. Robert Bolton points out that the second corresponds to the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome and the third to the Middle Ages. However I want to break them down further by taking the last period and applying the same process to it. I want to do this for two reasons. Firstly, this period falls well within historical times and so events are more familiar to us, but secondly, there is the idea that as the cycles progress so time and the rate of change speed up. Therefore the effects of cyclical change are easier to see. Once again I am copying Robert Bolton with this table whose fascinating book is the inspiration for this post. Please note that when it says 'Golden age' in the table what is meant is the first section of the fourth section of the Kali Yuga thus gold of iron of iron.

• Golden age 1564 - 1770   206 years
• Silver age    1770 - 1926  156 years
• Bronze age 1926 - 2030   104 years
• Iron age      2030 - 2082     52 years

It will be seen that we are now living in pretty grim times, spiritually speaking! No doubt this is what the Masters referred to when they told me during the 1990s that never before had there been a time of such vulgarity.

Looking at these dates the first thing that strikes me is that the so called Golden age of this sub-cycle went from the Reformation and the birth of science (as it is understood in modern terms) to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Galileo was born in 1564 and Beethoven in 1770. These are two individuals who can very well be taken as representing spirits of a new age. The one as a scientist who confronted religious authorities and the other as the most important artist of the Romantic period which was a definitive shift away from God as the centre to man as the centre. Whatever the quality of Beethoven's music might be the fact is that it signified a spiritual loss. Man felt his exile from heaven more than ever before. It's probably a coincidence that the dates are so neat. We can't always expect things to fall into place quite so smoothly as this. Rather like astrology, this system is not an exact science. Nevertheless these dates do speak eloquently from a symbolical point of view.

The Silver age takes us right up to the brink of modernity. The 1st World War swept away the past, and the twenties are always regarded as the start of something quite new. Art, politics, everything changed in ways too well known for me to need to set them forth here. So what I want to do now is break down the third period, the one in which we live and therefore, it could be said, the most important from our point of view. Please note that this time the golden age is the gold of bronze of iron of iron. I'm sorry - it's getting a little complicated at this point!

• Golden age  1926 - 1968  42 years
• Silver age    1968 - 1999  31 years
• Bronze age  1999 - 2020  21 years
• Iron age       2020 - 2030  10 years

The dates here are not quite exact because the periods do not break down into whole numbers precisely to the year, but they are near enough. 1968 is a significant date. It might be said to be when the momentum built up during the early sixties really kicked in and the new ways, a focus on youth, sexual liberation and so forth, spread from a select group right out to the whole populace. I believe it's when colour TV started in England and there's a whole symbolism right in that fact. 1999, apart from being the end of the millennium, can be seen as the time when computers and the internet started to enter every home. Of course, these things build up gradually, they don't come out of nowhere, but if you are looking for tipping points these dates are about the best there are.

You can carry on breaking these periods down endlessly. For instance, the bronze and iron ages of the period from 1926-1968 start around 1956 and 1964 which strike me as periods of significant change, while the silver age of the period from 1968-1999 coincides almost exactly with the '80s, a time of increasing globalism, unregulated capitalism and the spread of what is called by its opponents and maybe is, cultural Marxism. Obviously one can take this sort of thing too far but that does not discount the fact that, using this method, significant patterns emerge without them being forced to do so.

The question could nevertheless be asked what is the point of all this? Is it just a bit of fun, the truth of which you can neither prove nor disprove, or does it have any purpose? To be honest, I'm not sure. I do think, though, that studying these dates can prepare us for change and help us to respond to it in a spiritually intelligent way. Particularly when you bear in mind that the dates are turning points when what already exists for an elite or group of specialists spreads out into the mainstream. It looks as though the next bit of the cycle will be starting up in a few years time, and then the final phase in the whole process ten years after that. These may well be, to put it neutrally, interesting times and it might help to know that there is some kind of pattern behind it all.


A Note on the Krita Yuga.
To say that the Krita Yuga or Golden Age was a time of greater general openness to the reality of the spiritual plane, and an ordering of the world in accordance with that reality, does not mean that there were people of the stature of a Christ or Buddha walking around then. In fact it may need the relative spiritual darkness of the Kali Yuga to enable a true spirituality to be born, in which the soul on an individual level, through its own efforts, struggle and suffering, can awaken and develop the capacity for love and wisdom within itself. For a pre-lapsarian Adam to become a Christ you might say. The Krita Yuga was a time when the quality of the higher planes of existence still 'seeped through' into this world and the divine order of being could be more correctly discerned, but that would still only have been according to the degree of inner development of the people at that time.

Drug taking is an illicit attempt to recapture something of the consciousness of earlier periods. It is illicit precisely because it seeks to acquire the consciousness without developing the proper character. The aim now is to develop a spiritual character and not simply experience a spiritual consciousness. That is why the Masters constantly emphasised to me the importance of love and humility, and regarded the search for mystical experience as unproductive and potentially even detrimental to true spiritual growth.

The Masters Revisited

Rather neglecting the title of this blog and one of its chief purposes, I have not written anything about the Masters for a while. This is partly because there is a sense in which the Masters are quite incidental to the spiritual path which is concerned above all with finding the truth within, even if that does not mean neglecting it as it exists outwardly. The Masters, as long as they are seen as beings separate from us, belong to the world of phenomena (not in themselves, of course, but as they exist in our perception). Thus to focus on them too much is to lose connection to the light within oneself, and their only aim is to guide us to that light.

But I have also not written about the Masters recently because I know that some people, who might be interested in the spiritual matter of these essays, are put off by talk of Masters, such is the disrepute into which channeling and the idea of transcendent, superhuman beings, whose existence cannot be proven, has fallen. Now it is perfectly true that there has been a lot of nonsense talked about Masters and supposed enlightened beings, and the subject is riddled with superstition and illusion, but do we let the existence of fake gold cause us to deny the real thing? It may be rarer but it does exist, and simply means that we have to use our discrimination. I appreciate that the idea of Masters can also seem to have a sensationalist aspect to it, but again that is to mistake imitation for reality. There is nothing remotely sensationalist about the Masters as they truly are, and in no way does acknowledging their reality materialize spirituality as some would have it. Unless, that is, you think that paying any attention to Jesus or the Buddha materializes spirituality.

So now it's time to write a little more about the Masters as I knew them though I cannot claim extensive knowledge. If they are the generals in a large army then I am a recently enlisted private, but they have at least inspected me on the parade ground and passed a few comments on the way I was turned out with some advice on improvements I could make if I wished to progress through the ranks. So my knowledge of the Masters may be limited but I have encountered them and spoken with them, as a consequence of which I can be a witness to the fact of their existence, and confirm that they truly are oceans of love and wisdom who embody the highest one can imagine in terms of human perfection. They are souls who have gone beyond identification with the limited created aspect of their being and healed the ancient split in the psyche that marked our separation from divine oneness. Having died to self, they have risen to God and can point the way for anyone else who wishes to do the same. They are at the same time human, because the greater always includes the lesser (and they are not without a touch of humour), and remote because their outlook and understanding of life, its divine source and spiritual nature, removes them from our frankly trivial concerns. Nevertheless they understand these concerns and can fully enter into our problems and difficulties, even if, from their perspective, these problems and difficulties are seen to be rather less important than we, still caught up in them, might imagine. If you can envisage someone who is both austere and full of love, and whose understanding of you is total but without judgment or condemnation, who sees you exactly as you are, with all your hidden motivations and self concern, and who still loves you, truly seeing you as a child of God, then you have an idea of what a Master is like.


The question might be asked that, if I have met the Masters, why have so few others been fortunate enough to have had a similar experience? If they exist why do they not make their presence known to all, and put humanity back on the right track? Why leave us in spiritual ignorance when it should be so simple to guide us to the truth? But perhaps things are not that simple. Have you ever wondered why this world is so perfectly set up that those who wish to believe in spiritual truth can find enough to confirm their beliefs while those who do not so wish can also find, or think they have, evidence to confirm them in their assumptions? This is because there must be no coercion in real religion. God wants lovers not slaves who believe because they have no choice. And he wants belief to come from within, from the heart, because only then can it permeate and transform the whole character. So, in line with the law of free will, the Masters cannot suddenly appear and put everything to rights. That would contravene the whole purpose of this Earth which is a school for the development of saints. They might be able to appear to those who are ready for such a thing, in other words, who are sufficiently awakened spiritually, but even this does not necessarily mean a direct encounter. Simply hearing about them could be enough. Even meeting them in a book is a perfectly valid way to come into their presence, and contact on the higher planes is another way to know them. This may not be registered by the physical brain but will still seep down into everyday consciousness in the form of greater intuitive perception.

So, even if no others factors were taken into account, the Masters could not just appear to all and sundry because that would violate the laws that govern how humanity can grow spiritually.

But there are other factors and chief of them is that the Masters (except possibly a few of their number) do not live in the physical world so their ability to communicate directly with it is limited. They exist in a spiritual form (once described by one of them as a sea of azure blue and gold) which means that contact with them is not easy even if it should be wished. Michael Lord was an unusual medium as was the Boy. As the Masters themselves told me, the ordinary psychic or medium would not be able to support their presence or their vibration as we say nowadays. Think of how too strong a current can burn out the filament in a light bulb and you will understand what is meant by that. In this example the strength of the wire equals the purity of the soul.

Something else that those who might wish a public appearance of the Masters should consider is that they are not, anymore than Jesus was, all sweetness and light. Jesus himself said that he did not come to bring peace but a sword by which he meant the sword that separates truth from falsehood, and the Masters, should they appear, would similarly bring a fire which could burn as well as illuminate. Are we ready for that? Are we prepared for the sacrifices that the approach of a truly spiritual force would require us to make? Look what the world did to Jesus when it became clear that he was not going to satisfy its expectations of what he should be. Could it be that the reality of what he was showed people something about themselves that they did not like, and so he had to be got rid of? A true Master does not treat everyone with the same benign love regardless of their inner state. He loves, certainly, but he is the most intolerant of beings, and what he does not tolerate is precisely falsehood, or sin as we are no longer willing to call it. Not that he condemns the sinner, for whom he has infinite compassion, but he requires any individual who wishes to associate with him to confront the darkness in their own soul. And then to do something about it. He is endlessly patient and forgiving, but he is also demanding and relentless. As a physician of souls that is what he has to be.

On the subject of Jesus, I have been asked if I see him as similar to the Masters or them as like him, meaning, I suppose, someone who has reached the pinnacle of human spiritual achievement and demonstrated the truth of the liberated or enlightened state. My answer is, no I do not. The Masters, elevated as they are, are human beings, human beings who may have joined the company of saints, but human beings, or past human beings, nonetheless. I think of Jesus as more than this. You only have to read the Gospels to see that here was a person like none other before or since. One who embodied spiritual perfection to the highest degree, and who could say "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life" and not just mean it metaphorically. There is no other historical figure who could do this, and none who spoke with such authority as Jesus did. His resurrection from the dead (surely a real thing and not just symbolic or it would not have had the effect it did) was the triumph of spirit over matter, healing a most ancient wound and opening a door into the heavenly realm for all mankind. I am aware of the Theosophical theory that the Master Jesus was overshadowed by the Christ, a higher spiritual being, and I don't dismiss it entirely but I don't think it begins to uncover the mystery of what the Incarnation signified. The traditional view of Christ as the Son of God may seem too extreme for many people nowadays, but it conveys a deeper sense of truth than any other. The very moving passage at the end of  'Towards the Mysteries' when Swami Omananda asks her Master if it was from Christ that he came and whether the Masters were the messengers of Christ, and is told "Yes. He sent us out" rings very true to me, and supports my contention that Christ was/is something much more than 'just' a Master himself.

Over the years I have come more and more to understand what I think I have always known in my heart and that is that all spiritual truth is summed up in the figure of Jesus Christ and his teachings. Other approaches to spirituality, worthy and excellent as they may be, do but approximate to what came from Jesus. They may contain elements that it does not emphasise, but it alone and he alone contain the pure spiritual essence or heart of truth. This doesn't mean that I think everyone should become a Christian to be saved (to use conventional Christian terminology) or that I think anyone professing, however sincerely, Christianity will necessarily be saved. As Christ made quite clear not everyone calling on his name will find their name in the Book of Life. Besides all forms of Christianity are much departed from the pure truth of Christ even if that shines at the heart of them still since its light cannot be extinguished. And nor does it mean I would advocate a new and theoretically better form of Christianity. There are quite enough sects as it is, and any new one would soon take on the faults of all those currently existing, probably much more quickly as we are much further on from the initial fecundating principle. But I do believe that we all must become inner followers of the way laid down by Jesus, whatever our external path, and that his pre-eminence as the divine prototype should be recognised. It is a mistake to regard Jesus Christ as no more than a soul that has realised God like various others in history. These may be saints and sages but they are not Christ.

I may disappoint some of my readers in saying this. I hope not. It does not lessen my love and reverence for the Buddha and the holy men of India and elsewhere one jot. Nor do I question their achievement. Nevertheless I think that, certainly as far as this world is concerned, it is in Christ that we must look for the greatest spiritual truth, and through him that we see most clearly into the sacred heart of reality. He represents a spirituality that has gone beyond mere oneness or non-duality to a higher understanding in which the purpose of creation as bringing to fruition the twin realities of the One and the Many, Sameness and Difference, Truth and Love, is most fully revealed. In him being and becoming are perfectly reconciled, and from their complete union is born the true Son of God.

The Masculine and The Feminine

I recently read an article putting the case against women priests in Christianity. It took the position that the sexes have their proper roles, not totally unique but not arbitrary or interchangeable either, and that sex itself is not an accident of nature but something that reaches right to the core of our being, notwithstanding certain apparent exceptions, and reflects eternal realities. Thus a church that ordains women is one that confuses the roles of the sexes, denies archetypal truths and, ultimately, misunderstands the nature of God himself to whom the whole of creation is feminine because it is receptive to his life and gives form to his being. In essence, such a church is rejecting the order that God has established in the cosmos. It is forsaking quality in the name of an equality that actually only exists at the supra-formal level of pure oneness not at the level of phenomenal things and the world of multiplicity where it will only introduce, if imposed, disharmony and imbalance. The article concluded that when the sexes are mixed up in this way (and other ones, of course, but this is important because it relates to our approach to God), then the natural coherence of the social order will start to unravel, and any connection we might have to the true God will be lost because we have replaced that with an image of our own making and fantasy.

It may surprise some readers of this blog but I completely agree with these sentiments. I do think that the priest in Christianity is a male function  because he stands in the place of Christ who was male, and not by chance but because he represented the active masculine divine principle (the Father) in contrast to the receptive feminine one embodied by Mary. A true priest is not just a minister, counsellor, teacher or even spiritual adviser, all of which a woman can be just as well as a man. He is a symbol (a symbol being an outer sign of an inner reality), and he is a symbol firstly of Jesus and then, through Jesus, of God. Only a masculine priest can truly symbolise a masculine God. And God the Father and Lord of Creation is masculine.

Once this would have been an uncontroversial statement to make but times have changed and now it must be explained. Before I do so though I should point out, in the context of women priests, that to any person claiming Christian belief it should not be controversial since it is a fundamental part of the Christian faith, one that derives from revelation. If you wish to justify the ordination of women you are challenging that revelation, and if you want to do that then why be a Christian? You cannot just appeal to a theoretical logic (male and female exist in the world so they must also do so, and equally so, in God), or, worse, the changing mores of fashion, since revelation by virtue of what it is goes far beyond either of these. If you reject the revelation why subscribe to the religion which is founded on that revelation? But this simple fact appears to be ignored and so we see the greater truth sacrificed in the name of the lesser. That is to say, human concerns and desires are placed ahead of divine principles, and eternal verities are subordinated to worldly priorities, ideologies, opinions and agendas. It should go without saying that people who do this can have no real understanding of what God is. Theirs is a God of convenience who is just a projection of their own ideals and objectives.

Therefore it can be said that women who want to become Christian priests may be well intentioned but they don't properly understand their own religion, and, as I hope to show, they don't understand inner spiritual realities, facts that pertain to the metaphysical order, either. The same applies to their male supporters. Of course, some few may actually be using this as a means to rebel against divine authority and the natural order of things but they, presumably, would be a small minority.

So why do I say that God is masculine? First of all, this does not mean he is male in the sense a man is or that men are closer to God than women. One's spiritual status has nothing to do with one's sex. Indeed, a woman's greater natural receptivity potentially makes her more open to the spiritual in many ways than is a man. However male and female are the biological versions of much deeper, indeed archetypal, principles of cosmic masculine and feminine that go right down to the roots of existence. They are a fundamental part of the divine order and necessarily exist even from before Creation since Creation, as an outward and real thing at least, results from their interaction. Unmanifest being or the Supreme Principle is beyond all duality and includes all things in itself but when God or Pure Spirit manifests or expresses itself there is a polarisation into spirit and matter which are the active and receptive (masculine and feminine) aspects of the one reality. These can be thought of as God and Nature, the Absolute and the Infinite, Essence and Substance and they are qualitatively different from one another even if ultimately one. These polarities exist as complements and all creation results from their union, but there is also a hierarchical dimension to their relationship because one comes before the other. Spirit precedes matter which is its dualistic opposite or reflection in manifestation. This is why we say (if we say correctly) spirit and matter rather than matter and spirit or Heaven and Earth instead of Earth and Heaven and so on. We even say man and woman and this is an intuitive recognition of reality not just a convention of language. You can rebel against this if you want to but a rebellion against reality is what it will be.

Thus the feminine or substantial aspect of reality is the result of the One becoming two in order to manifest. So is the masculine but that is the primary or subject principle, the feminine being the substance by means of which essence is expressed, the object to its subject and the way in which the subject, God, may know himself or, better put, reveal himself to himself. The two aspects of reality always exist together as one implies the other but matter is the consequence of pure transcendent spirit becoming dual in order to see itself in a world of subject and object, a world of becoming, growing, changing, multiplying. This does not imply male superiority in human terms* but the reality is that, while the sexes are complementary one to another, it is also the case that, cosmically speaking, the feminine principle in manifestation is or should be passive to the masculine as matter is or should be passive to spirit. This gives us a relationship in which there is complementarity and hierarchical difference at the same time with both of equal importance.  Previous generations understood this intuitively (albeit often imperfectly which is why the hierarchical difference was taken out of context and misinterpreted to mean male all round superiority which led to the present day reaction and then, as usually happens with pendulum swings, over-reaction), but for intellectually focused people such as ourselves the outwardly paradoxical nature of such an idea is difficult to grasp.

What this comes down to is that, although God in terms of non-manifest being may be beyond all distinctions of quality (as we understand it anyway), in his aspect of the Creator he can properly be conceived of as the masculine polarity of being with Nature, the form in and through which life comes to know itself, object as opposed to subject, the feminine polarity.  God, therefore, God the Creator, is legitimately thought of as Father. That is true as far as the macrocosm goes and it is also true microcosmically since, as is often said, all souls are feminine to God, meaning souls can only become spiritually alive through receiving spiritual impregnation, otherwise known as grace, from God.

So this is why God as Creator and Transcendent Reality can reasonably be thought of in masculine terms.  At the same time, as part of that or projected from it, and because the primal duality is reflected at every level of the unfolding universe, a divine feminine principle also exists within Creation and is revealed in such qualities as Beauty and Compassion. But to move from acknowledging the reality that some of the divine qualities are accurately described as feminine to conceiving of God as “She” is a metaphysical mistake caused by the failure to distinguish between divine essence and its energies or to see that the world of Creation in its entirety is the substantial pole of existence which must be receptive to (or impregnated by) active Spirit in order to blossom. This does not mean that divine energies and beings (which, cosmically speaking, are the same thing) cannot be envisaged in the form of goddesses or angels or that we should not acknowledge the Queen of Heaven or Divine Mother, but these are still part of Creation and not to be confused with the Creator. Traditionally goddesses have nearly always been associated with the natural worlds and energies, and the soul or psyche of things rather than the life or spirit which is masculine in terms of the duality necessary for manifested existence. Or else as wisdom (Sophia), regarded as the first created of beings but still a created being not the Creator. To confuse male and female in spiritual terms is to confuse essence with substance, what fertilises with what is fertilised, the ground of Creation with the Creator. For Christians to do this is to risk returning to the pantheistic attitudes of paganism in which divine immanence is celebrated but the sense of transcendence is lost while Nature is quasi-deified and God as Creator given a back seat if one at all. Those who fear that the introduction of women priests (apart from being symbolically wrong) will lead to the introduction of the idea of God as equally 'she' as 'he' are right; and a belief in the deity as female practically always leads to a form of paganism or pantheism in which nature is venerated for itself, and the transcendent Creator God, the One who is the source of all and of whom creation is the expression not a thing in its own right to be worshipped or treated as divine or sacred in any independent way, is neglected. If nature is to be regarded as sacred it must not be for itself but because it is the expression of the One who made it. Any other approach will keep us identified with form and the outer sheaths of being.

So it is very likely that women priests will introduce or re-introduce the idea of God as 'she', and this will result in a gradual loss of the sense of transcendence, a disconnect from the absolute and the eventual idea that nature in some sense is God on her own. There will be much talk of an all purpose love, compassion and equality but hierarchical distinctions will be dissolved and egalitarian relativism installed in their place. Truth will be replaced by truths, yours and mine, each one of which will be more or less as valid as any other. The resulting religious emphasis will be very 'this worldly'. Obviously none of this will happen immediately but there will be tendencies towards it, and these, in fact, can already be clearly seen as egalitarian and liberal (i.e. worldly) values gradually take precedence over spiritual ones in churches which accept women as priests.

Don't misinterpret this to mean that men are somehow intrinsically more spiritual than women. I have already dismissed this notion but, just to leave no room for misunderstanding, let me state quite categorically that one's spiritual state is a purely individual thing, totally independent of any outer quality such as sex, race or the shape of one's nose. Here we are talking purely in the context of priests. As a matter of fact, I would suggest that the more spiritually aware woman would not want to be a priest as she will intuitively recognise that the nature of such an office is inherently masculine so her form of service will lie elsewhere.

To conclude, it is undoubtedly the case that any idea we might have of God is an image and a symbol which cannot approach reality, but that does not mean that anything goes. After all a rose is a symbol of beauty in a way a thistle is not. It conveys to us something of that of which it is the symbol. Thus to think of the transcendent creator God as masculine is symbolically accurate in a way that to think of him as feminine is not. At the same time, Divine Reality most certainly has a feminine aspect which has been neglected in the past and this is most perfectly represented by the image of the Mother of God (the Mother of God as incarnate Son not unmanifest Father), the embodiment of wisdom, mercy, purity and compassion, and the first being in Creation.

*Note:  Just to be clear on this point. The masculine and feminine principles exist in both men and women but in men they are, or should be, in the overall context of masculinity and in women they are, or should be, in the overall context of femininity. That this is not always the case is evidence that we live in a fallen world which has deviated from the truth. That it is less the case today than ever is evidence that we live in the Kali Yuga or end times or whatever one wishes to call that period at the end of an age when the material pole and everything associated with it dominates the spiritual.